Serious problems with the WIFI today at the plenary session so I wasn’t able to do any live blogging.

The plenary session today had a bit of a different feel from those that I’ve been to in the past. I expected a series of bullet point presentations detailing every new feature of ArcGIS 10. Instead, ESRI focused more on delivering a high level overview of ArcGIS 10 that highlighted the integration between the desktop, server, and mobile environments. I thought they did a pretty good job of delivering this message through a series of demonstrations.

Here were my top 10 highlights of the day in no particular order:

Sounds like ESRI is beginning to embrace crowd sourced data and social media. So much for the argument that crowd sourced data isn’t useful because it doesn’t originate from an “authoritative source”!

ESRI is publishing their REST Interface as an Open Standard like they did the Shapefile

World Topographic Basemap provides a seamless worldwide basemap at many scales from data compiled from many sources. The cartographic quality of this basemap is excellent.

It comes as no surprise, but Cloud computing is clearly a big part of the future for ESRI.

I thought the ability to create PowerPoint like presentations in ArcGIS Explorer Online was a nice addition.

ArcGIS for the iOS on the iPad. The interface is really sweet! Business Analyst Online a free application for the iPhone.

Lots of new functionality and performance improvements in ArcGIS 10 Desktop.

Social and Community Analyst product coming this Fall. Built for policy makers who need rich information and analysis. Available on the desktop, online, and server.

I think Jack mentioned that this is the largest gathering yet for the UC. Never heard an exact number, but just walking around it certainly felt as though there were more people than in the past.

Enjoyed the keynote from Richard Saul Wurman, et al. Quite different from past keynote presentations. Never thought I’d see Johnny Cash at the ESRI UC!

There was much more content today, and I’m sure other bloggers will fill in the gaps. More tomorrow.

Simon Thompson and James Killick gave overview presentations to begin the summit. Killick gave us a nice overview of Business Analyst Online. In addition, he also demonstrated Business Analyst for the iPhone. There are some pretty cool capabilities of BA for the iPhone including some exciting reports that can compare the demographic characteristics of your current location to other locations that you have stored or that you manually enter.

Since I’m from San Antonio I was excited to see that both keynote speakers had Texas roots as well. Mac McClure, Chairman of the Board, McClure Partners was really the highlight of the summit. McClure Partners in Dallas, Texas, is a multi-corporation holding firm that includes commercial brokerage, property management, and development companies. If you can’t get excited about GIS after hearing this guy talk about how he has used GIS to transform his company then you need to find another line of work! McClure gave a detailed description of how his company used Business Analyst to research the acquisition of several dozen Chili’s restaurants in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa. It was quite obvious that Mr. McClure believes strongly in the power of GIS for making sound business decisions.

Next up was Manny Rios, Senior Vice President, P&C Underwriting with USAA in San Antonio. Mr. Rios described how USAA is using GIS to accurately assess risk for residential properties of its members.

After lunch the summit continued with individual paper sessions covering a variety of topics including mobile geomarketing, methodologies for advanced customer analytics, applications in commercial real estate, technologies for GIS in transportation and others.

Looking forward to the plenary session tomorrow morning! I’ll have more then.